The Facebook pixel and how to use it to boost your business

As promised, after talking about the Facebook pixel in the post on how to create a Facebook advertising account, today we bring you a complete breakdown of the main questions that usually arise when using this advertising tool. We will tell you what exactly this pixel is, what it is for, how to integrate it into a website, blog or e-commerce, and even how to remove it. In short, everything you need to know to get started in this Facebook advertising format.

What is the Facebook pixel?

It’s about a javascript code which, once placed on your website, will allow you to record conversions, create audiences, remarket and get statistics about the use of your website, blog or ecommerce. In other words, it allows you to fully track the user from the impact produced by Facebook advertising to what he then does on our website (visit it, buy, etc.), and even impact him again with Facebook advertising. more focused on the interests that you have discovered about him after visiting your website.

It is important to know that this code will be completely invisible to the user and that it exists a single pixel available for each Facebook ad account. However, we will have two types of codes, the pixel base code and the event code, which we will explain later what exactly each one is for.

What is the Facebook pixel used for?

If you are used to advertising on Facebook or other online platforms, it is possible that the previous description has been really interesting for you and you already want to get down to work with the Facebook pixel. But in case you still have doubts about the possibilities offered by this Facebook Ads tool, below we specify its more specific uses:

  • Conversion tracking: you will be able to know what the exact reaction of the user has been with respect to each ad and even see its navigability from various devices until it reaches the conversion.
  • event measurement as:
    • Items added to the shopping cart
    • Items added to wish list
    • Payment information added
    • payment started
    • product purchase
    • Potential customer (Lead)
    • registration completed
    • Search on the website
    • displayed content
  • Campaign optimization: you can automatically bid for conversions.
  • Remarketing: impact again on those people who have visited your site, or certain pages of it, with advertising specially focused on them.
  • Creation of audiences: to further adapt the advertising content to each of them. This functionality will allow us to generate the profile of the most interesting buyer personas for our business. You can also generate “similar audiences” by reaching people who are similar to your most loyal customers.
  • Dynamic Product Ads: adapted to the most visited products on your website and to the specific public interested in them.

How to integrate the Facebook pixel on your website or ecommerce?

Now that you will have much clearer everything that the Facebook pixel can bring you when advertising on this social network, we are going to see what are the steps to follow to create it and integrate it correctly on our website or online store:

  • STEP 1: Create the Facebook pixel
    1. From your Business Manager or Ads Manager, you can access the “Pixels” tab in the menu. Click there and a screen similar to this will automatically appear:
    2. You will only have to click on the “create a pixel” button to get the Facebook pixel for that ad account. Remember that there is only one pixel for each account.
    3. Next, a window will appear where you can put the name of the pixel (or leave the one that comes by default) and you will have to accept the Facebook Pixel Conditions (which I recommend you read).
    4. And you will have created your Facebook pixel!
  • STEP 2: Install the Facebook pixel on the web
    1. Once you’ve created your pixel, the Facebook wizard continues to guide you through the installation steps. And first of all it will ask you how you want to install it, offering you two options:
      • tag manager (Google Tag Manager or Segment) or integration with platforms (You can use it if your website has a CMS: Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento).
      • Copy and paste the code: It simply consists of copying and pasting the code on your website, practically the same as installing Google Analytics.
    2. Next, depending on the option chosen, Facebook will show you a different path to follow for its installation. I recommend that you let yourself be guided by his steps, however, if you have any questions, you can ask us by commenting on this post. The most important thing you have to know at this point is that you will have to install two codes:
      • Base code (in each page of the website or header)
      • Event code (on certain pages)
  • STEP 3: Check that the pixel is correctly installed
    1. Once all the codes are installed, we will verify that they are correctly installed by going to the Facebook Ads Manager, specifically to the Pixels section (where we created the pixel at the beginning).
    2. It is important to know that we must wait about 20 minutes from installation to verification. It is there where we can see if the status of the Facebook pixel is active, and therefore it is well installed.
    3. In the event that the message that it shows us is “no activity yet” and the 20 minutes have already passed, everything indicates that we have done something wrong during the installation process. If so, go to the Facebook pixel assistant that will help you detect possible errors.

Facebook pixel in WordPress

If the CMS on which your website, blog or online store is based is WordPress, we are going to give you some tips to install the Facebook Pixel quickly and easily, seeing all the available options.

On the one hand, as you well know, there are plugins for everything, so there are also WordPress plugins to install the Facebook pixel. We recommend: Facebook Pixel by PixelYourSite (exclusively designed for this purpose), Tracking Code Manager (useful if you have more codes on your website such as Google Analytics, Google Remarketing, Zendesk, etc.) or Insert Headers and Footers (to insert any type of code in your headers and footers).

Another easy solution, if you use it, is the Google Tag Manager that will allow you to add the general pixel to all pages and to specific pages the pixel for each event you want to track. The steps to follow are:

  1. Enter the Google Tag Manager
  2. Select the website container
  3. Click “add tag”
  4. Select Custom HTML Tag and name it
  5. Copy the Facebook pixel base code (in your Facebook Ads Manager)
  6. Paste it into the container (in your Google Tag Manager)
  7. Go to “advanced settings” and in the “activation options” check “once per page”
  8. Hit “continue” and “all pages”
  9. And finally to “create label”
  10. Then, we will have to create the tags for each event, but in this case remember not to select “all pages” as each tag must be associated with a specific one.
  11. Once you have all the tags created in the container, click “publish”

Finally, another option is to insert the code directly into your WordPress. To do this, you must insert the base code of the Facebook pixel in the HEADER (between the

and

tags) that surely sounds familiar to you because it is the same place where the Google Analytics code is usually placed. Then, you will have to manually insert in each page that interests you the rest of the codes referring to the specific events.

Facebook pixel in Prestashop

The question of how to install the Facebook pixel in Prestashop is usually common? And it is surprising to see during the installation that there is integration with ecommerce platforms such as Magento, BigCommerce and Shopify, but not with Prestashop. In this case, we could perform the installation by copying and pasting the code into the header.tpl file, specifically between the and tags, and then the event codes on each of the corresponding pages.

But, if you don’t have much technical knowledge, or you do but want to save time, what we recommend is to use one of the Prestashop modules specially designed for it. Here you have two options: Conversion Pixel Module + Custom Audiences and Pixel Plus Module: Conversions + Events + Audiences.

How to remove the Facebook pixel?

Since Facebook announced that it was going to eliminate the conversion pixels (they no longer work since February 15, 2017) to replace them with the new ones (of which we have been talking about), many users have wondered how to completely eliminate the previous ones. pixels that they had installed on their websites. Well, here we are going to tell you the solution.

For remove facebook pixel old or conversion, you will have to follow the steps you did for the installation but in reverse. That is, if you installed the code by copying and pasting it in your header and in each of the pages, you will have to go there to remove it or replace it with the new format. And if you used the tag manager or platform integration, you will have to go to the section where you copied your code to remove it. If, even after deleting it, you see that the pixel is still active, it is possible that the reason is that you have an active campaign that refers to these pixels. Delete the campaign to make the pixels completely non-functional, and once you have the new pixels installed, start a new campaign.

Another option you have is replace the conversion pixel with the new Facebook pixel. And for this you must follow these steps:

  • STEP 1: Update the code
      1. Create your new pixel by going to the Facebook Pixel section of your ads manager and click on “create a pixel”, name it and click OK.
      2. Include the pixel codebase in your website header (but don’t delete the old one).
      3. Go to each page where you had the conversion pixel and create a new event code for each of them and then put the new code (but do not delete the old one). Below we indicate the correspondence between the type of conversion pixel and the standard event code. However, remember that you can also create custom events.

    conversion pixel
    standard event

    Payments Buy Registrations Registration Complete Leads Leads Key Page Views Content Viewed Items Added to Cart Item Added to Cart Other Website Conversions Custom Event

    1. Check that the Facebook pixel has been installed correctly (see instructions above).
  • STEP 2: Migrate existing ads
    1. Find the ad in Facebook Ads Manager (or in Power Editor where…

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